A Brief History of Creation

by Bill Mesler

  An 1882 cartoon showing the implications of Darwinism.

  There is a certain logic to the fact that Darwin’s book did not delve too far into the notion of the origin of life. It was a book based on careful observation, crafted to navigate the criticisms that had once been heaped upon Vestiges. It was not a speculative book, and Darwin understood that his private beliefs on the subject of life’s ultimate origin would be just that. The phrase “by the Creator” was added to mollify Darwin’s critics in religious circles. Darwin would come to regret having made the change, and it would be pulled from the third edition.

  The way Darwin dealt with the origin of life was disappointing to many in the scientific world, including some in the close circle that was forming around him. They could see in Darwin’s theory the same implication that Darwin’s religiously minded critics would: life was completely the product of the forces of nature, nothing more. Even in the editions of Origin that didn’t contain the explicit reference to a “creator,” the allusion to life being “breathed into” something was easy to interpret as more than just overly cautious science. It smacked of cowardice.

  One of those critics was Richard Owen. If there was a living embodiment of just how far Origin had carried evolution into the mainstream of science, Owen was it. Staunchly conservative and religious, Owen had once sneered at the very idea of transmutation. Within a few years of the publication of Origin, Owen began sneering at evolutionists like Darwin who he felt had not gone far enough.

  In 1863, Owen published a book review in the pages of the Athenaeum, one of London’s most important literary magazines. The subject was ostensibly a book on microscopic organisms that delved into the issue of spontaneous generation, but Owen used the forum to throw criticism Darwin’s way. Owen’s name had been left off the masthead, but Darwin immediately recognized his old friend’s caustic style and the ideas he knew Owen held.

  In his article, Owen criticized Darwin for ignoring the body of evidence that microscopic organisms could arise spontaneously in mud, which would have made Origin a more complete explanation for the existence of life. He also took Darwin to task for his remark that life had been mystically “breathed” into the first organism, ridiculing Darwin for having described the first appearance of life in what Owen, relying on a once widely used expression referring to the first five books of the Old Testament, characterized as “Pentateuchal.” Owen continued the argument three years later in his book On the Anatomy of Vertebrates: “The doctrines of the generatio spontanea and of the transmutation of species are intimately connected. Who believes in the one, ought to take the other for granted, both being founded on the faith in the immutability of the laws of nature.”†

  Darwin was apoplectic. In a letter to the editor published in the Athenaeum, he asked, “Is there a fact, or a shadow of a fact supporting the belief that these elements, without the presence of any organic compounds, and acted on only by known forces, could produce a living creature?” But when it came to his choice of words on the appearance of the first life, Darwin became almost apologetic, saying that in “a purely scientific work I ought perhaps not to have used such terms; but they well serve to confess that our ignorance is . . . profound.”

  Even before Owen’s review appeared, Darwin was expressing much the same contrition about his word choice. “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly unknown process,” he had written to Hooker. Meanwhile, Darwin’s views on the subject of the appearance of the first living organisms were themselves evolving.

  By the next decade, with his reputation as a preeminent scientist beyond doubt, Darwin began to speculate more about that wholly unknown process, which he increasingly understood to be some form of spontaneous generation of organic life from inorganic building blocks. Again, his thoughts found their voice in a letter to Hooker. One, written in 1871, would become his most remembered on this topic. In it, Darwin wondered about the conditions that might have given birth to the very first living things. It would be, he guessed, “some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat electricity &c. present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.” It was a strikingly modern theory of how the origin of life could come about, and would still be considered a reasonably good guess more than a hundred years later.

  Darwin was still skeptical that such an act of spontaneous generation could take place in the Earth’s current highly developed state. The problem was his own law of natural selection. The first organism would be, by definition, poorly adapted to survive. “At the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed,” he wrote. As time went on, Darwin became more open to the idea of spontaneous generation in the modern environment. Others among the growing community of scientists called Darwinists were even more confident that this untapped piece of evolutionary theory, the “vital spark,” could be found, even that it could be recapitulated in a laboratory.

  NOT LONG AFTER the publication of Origin, Darwin came under fire for failing to acknowledge his predecessors in the development of evolutionary theory. Darwin recognized the flaw almost immediately after publication, and he went about forming a list of those he should have acknowledged. His list eventually grew to include ten names, including that of his grandfather Erasmus, Lamarck, Wallace, and Aristotle, the last of which was an error by Darwin, who had mistakenly taken Aristotle’s recitations of the views of others—which Aristotle did not share—as the Greek’s own.

  Today, the fact that the idea of evolutionary change was not first noted by Darwin has largely become irrelevant. He has become the de facto face of evolution, and the man behind the little fish with legs that people put on the backs of their cars. With the possible exception of Albert Einstein, no other figure is so closely identified with a scientific theory than Darwin is with evolution. And few besides Einstein come close in name recognition. Yet, while few really understand the principle of relativity beyond its iconic mathematical symbolization, E = mc2, evolution’s fundamental tenets are easily grasped.

  Darwin transformed the way we view life. Considering the scope of the change, he did it in a remarkably short period of time. The rapidity with which our perspective changed is owed partly to the fact that England’s liberalized society was prepared for the new theory, and partly to the general state of the life sciences, which were advanced enough that the mounting evidence of evolution was too hard to deny. But Darwin was ideally suited for the task of explaining evolution. His caution and hesitation, even what some supporters saw as cowardice, was a useful tool in winning over a skeptical public and doubtful scientists. He did not try to go too far, too fast.

  If Alfred Russel Wallace had not first mailed his essay to Darwin, Wallace himself might have been recognized as the “discoverer” of natural selection and thus come to occupy Darwin’s place in the pantheon of science. But Wallace may have been ill suited for such a role. Darwin was the more accomplished scientist and writer, and close to the organs of power and knowledge in the most powerful and influential state in the world, the United Kingdom. Wallace was a man of no means. He had no ties to universities, no friends in influential places in the sciences, and not even a university degree. In his later years, he flirted with disreputable forms of spiritualism and mesmerism. Under his leadership, acceptance of the basic tenets of evolution might have been an even slower process.

  Yet Wallace might have been more daring. He was much more willing to tackle, from the beginning, thorny issues like the subject of human beings’ evolution from apes. Darwin’s critics saw such an evolutionary implication from the day Origin first appeared. So did the most sympathetic of his scientific contemporaries. It took Darwin thirteen years to thoroughly address the question in his book The Descent of Man.

  Still, Darwin did address it pub
licly. That was something he never attempted in any significant way with the question of the origin of life. Despite his reluctance to face the subject head-on, his impact was profound. Before Darwin presented his model of evolution, it was not really even a single question. People asked where the first monkey came from, or the first shark. Earlier naturalistic explanations of the origin of life—from the Greeks to Buffon—had revolved around the question of the first of each species, but not the first species, period. Those who believed in spontaneous generation as the source of creation, like d’Holbach, believed that the embryo of an elephant or even a human being could be the result of spontaneous generation from inorganic sources. This view was still held by some scientists in Darwin’s time. Lamarck’s concept was essentially a version of this. But after Darwin, the question crystallized. It became the search for a single living organism to which all other living things were related. Those who once wondered about the first of each species now wondered about a single first ancestor of all of them.

  In Darwin’s growing brood of evolutionary thinkers, there were others willing to meet the question of the origin of life head-on. Over the last few decades of his life, Darwin would watch from the sidelines as one of his most promising disciples would engage in a famous struggle over the origin of life, pitted against a scientist who saw evolution, at least at first, as an enemy. By the time it was all over, the winner of the argument would achieve a legendary reputation that would rival Darwin’s own. The loser would find himself all but forgotten.

  * Although they would come to be known as “finches,” the birds Darwin encountered on the Galápagos were not related to true finches in the taxonomic sense. The confusion is largely the result of the popular 1947 book Darwin’s Finches, written by David Lack.

  † Owen’s attacks on Darwin shifted wildly over the years. He could attack Darwin, on the one hand, for suggesting that humans were related to apes—which Owen never accepted—and, on the other hand, for taking too much credit for the development of evolutionary theory. Darwin found the depth of Owen’s animosity perplexing. Jealousy at being shut out of Darwin’s circles of intimates has been suggested as a motivation.

  PLEASANT, THOUGH THEY BE DECEITFUL DREAMS

  To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ’Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things.

  —SIR ISAAC NEWTON, Principia, 1687

  ON APRIL 7, 1864, a huge crowd filled the grand amphitheater at the Sorbonne in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Among them were some of the cream of Parisian high society, including Princess Mathilde (the niece of Napoleon Bonaparte and cousin of the Russian tsar) and Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, who had become a famous writer under her pen name, George Sand, and was the lover of Chopin, as well as, it was whispered, the actress Marie Doval. Dupin was a regular at such events, always recognizable because of her taste for dressing in men’s clothing. Sitting prominently in the front row was another writer known to all of Paris, Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

  The lecture was part of a new series of free biweekly lectures hosted by the University of Paris, part of the university’s push to generate public interest and support for its work. The Monday lectures were devoted entirely to science. Billed as “scientific soirées,” they proved a huge draw. Part of the attraction was the array of technological devices the university had acquired for the amphitheater. Gas lighting could be raised or lowered at the touch of a button. An electric arc lamp, invented by Humphry Davy, could be used to project a single beam of light onto the stage, illuminating the speaker or selected exhibits. To the amazement of audiences, it could also be used to project photographic images that had been encased in glass slides.

  The week before, six thousand people had shown up for the inaugural science lecture on the subject of the three physical states of matter delivered by the physicist Jules Jasmin. Most of the throng had been forced to stand outside, crowding around doors trying to get a peek at the goings-on inside. This week the soirée organizers expected an even larger turnout, owing to the popularity of the lecturer, a handsome and charismatic man with a reputation for giving captivating speeches, who was fast becoming the darling of the French scientific establishment. His name was Louis Pasteur.

  The Sorbonne event represented a victory lap for Pasteur. For the previous three years, he had been engaged in a public debate over the topic of spontaneous generation with the man who had been considered the country’s leading advocate of the theory, the well-respected naturalist Félix Pouchet, director of the Natural History Museum in Rouen. Their debate had generated so much attention that the French Academy of Sciences had decided to try to bring it to a resolution by offering the organization’s prestigious Alhumbert Prize and a 2,500-franc award to the scientist who could shed the most light on the question. Pasteur had been judged the winner, and the academy had lauded his mastery of the experimental method. The victory had made him a hero in Catholic circles, where he came to be seen as the defender of traditional religious beliefs against the heresies of radical scientific materialism.

  The French translation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been in print for three years, and Pasteur began his address by summarizing the questions that were on the minds of these Parisians: whether “creation ought to be dated thousands of years or thousands of centuries past, whether species are fixed, or rather undergo a slow progressive transformation into new species.” Pasteur was always a masterful orator, but never more so than that evening at the Sorbonne. Like Shakespeare’s Marc Antony, who came to bury Caesar, not to praise him, Pasteur began by saying that he could answer none of those questions. He then went on to imply that he had answered them all.

  Pasteur summarized the evolutionary theory by repeating a rough account of the concept from a book many in the audience would have read: La mer (The Sea), by the radical historian-turned-evolutionist Jules Michelet: “We simply take a drop of sea-water, and out of this water, which contains a bit of inanimate nitric matter, sea-mucus, or, as he calls it, fertile jelly, the first creatures emerge by spontaneous generation, transforming themselves bit by bit, they climb the ranks of creation, reaching, after, say, ten thousand years, the level of insects, and doubtless, after a hundred thousand years, the level of apes, and of Man himself.” Behind it all, continued Pasteur, lay one question at the root of the whole evolutionary proposition: “Mightn’t matter, perhaps, organize itself? Or . . . mightn’t creatures enter the world without parents, without forebears?” If life were merely an outcome of natural processes, Pasteur told his audience, then they could arrive at no other conclusion than that “God is useless.”

  Pasteur then proceeded to recite the history of beliefs on spontaneous generation, from van Helmont to Needham and Buffon to the more modern scientists who embraced the idea. But there was something that all of these esteemed naturalists had missed, he said. At that point, the gas lighting dimmed until the room was dark except for a single beam of light dramatically projected onto the stage. There, in the illumination, he directed the audience’s attention to the thousands of tiny dust particles that now flickered in the lighted haze above the stage. There in the dust, said Pasteur, was the reason so many great minds of the past had fallen into falsely believing they had witnessed the spontaneous generation of life: tiny microorganisms, invisible and countless, drifting through the air we breathe. Drawing upon the name used by preformationists, he called them “germs.” The idea would eventually help make Pasteur one of the most legendary scientists in history.

  IN PASTEUR’S LATER YEARS, after his work on understanding the causes and prevention of infectious diseases had led to remarkable advances in medicine that would establish his place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest scientists, he maintained that spontaneous generation was the most important question he had ever put his mind to. It was a question loaded with
metaphysical importance, especially in France. As a crucial part of the broad evolutionary framework of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, spontaneous generation was a theory that openly attacked the whole concept of a living world crafted by the hand of a deity. As France drifted ever deeper into politicized Catholicism, it also became an explicitly political question, one whose fortunes tended to ebb and flow with the notoriously fickle winds of postrevolutionary France.

  Lamarck developed his theory at the turn of the nineteenth century, during the turbulent days of the revolution, while working as a professor at the Jardin des Plantes, as the Jardin du Roi had been renamed by the revolutionaries. He had been hired by Buffon himself and was widely recognized as Buffon’s protégé. The young men of the revolution flocked to Lamarck’s lectures about a natural world that was ever in flux and constantly evolving. He even dared to suggest that the natural world had the power to create life itself. Making such a claim would have once meant risking persecution or death, and it was a view held only by atheists on the fringes of science. For the time being, though, the revolution had made such ideas palatable.

  As the French state and society grew more and more conservative with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Lamarck found his notions increasingly attacked or discarded. By the 1830s, the stage had been set for a decisive showdown in France over evolution. It would be waged by two of France’s most admired scientists, who had come to represent the two opposing poles of the evolutionary spectrum: Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.